Everybody’s talking ‘bout...
It’s a tale as old as time: hoax email leads to riots on the streets. Isn’t it time we wised up?
Just as the (false) promise of saucy pictures of tennis legend Anna Kournikova once led hundreds of thousands of computers to be infected with a nasty virus, the threat of a nasty real-world virus has led to a rather infectious email. In the midst of the recent Coronavirus outbreak, many Ukrainian citizens received an email purporting to be from the country’s ministry of health, announcing several cases of infection within the country. The email did not come from the ministry of health (it did not even originate from within Ukraine) but it did lead to violent protests as Chinese evacuees were brought into the country.
Email is not the only source of misinformation. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube et al have all been used to spread false news about the outbreak, either emitting from poor sources or backed up by no sources at all. That false, sensational information then becomes the source: both
The Sun and The Express in the UK, for example, picked up on an image which purported to be a satellite image showing mass cremations in China. This was neither a satellite image nor evidence of burning – it was a weather map.
Realistically this is not in the least surprising; where you might once have received a letter through the post urging you to send it on to ten others lest your little finger fall off, you now get a Facebook status saying the same, or a Tweet urging you to divulge ten highly personal facts about you – with the incentive the you may get to learn the same from others. Hoaxes presented as fact have become as normal as pictures of cute cats, and they’re shared just as widely. The press doesn’t tend to pick up on the content of chain letters, but they’ll print things which make for good headlines, which leaves us either believing everything or trusting nothing.
Just as you’re clever enough to disregard that obvious chain email, you’re clever enough to look at a sensational headline and question it. There are places you can go to find out if something is true or not; The ABC’s Fact Check ( www.abc.net.au/news/ factcheck/) is a local fact-checking service and a great place to start. TL